Sicken and So Die (3 page)

Sally Luther's relationship with the publicity machine was more complex. In her early twenties she had been the tabloids' darling. A pretty blonde ingenue, she had been cast effortlessly, straight out of drama school, as one of the leads in the ITV sitcom
Up To No Good
. In that show she had charmed the nation through four series, and become a familiar presence failing to answer the questions on showbiz quizzes, guesting daffily on game shows and manning phone-lines on charity telethons. She described the interior of her flat to colour supplements, her kind of day to the
Radio Times
, and her first kiss to teenage magazines. She had all the trappings of stardom: a fan club, a rose named after her, and even the unwanted attentions of obsessive fan letters and a mysterious stalker. The public loved her, she could do no wrong, and she made a very good living.

Sally Luther's fall from this state of grace was not dramatic. No messy break-ups from famous boyfriends, no arrests for drunken driving, no allegations of drug abuse. She just slowly dropped out of the public consciousness.
Up To No Good
was not recommissioned for a fifth series. The pilot for a new Sally Luther sitcom was rejected. Guest appearances in other sitcoms became more spaced out and finally dried up.

The public did not fall out of love with Sally Luther; they simply forgot about her. Without a weekly reminder of her face on their television screens, she slipped imperceptibly out of the collective memory.

She wasn't out of work. She wasn't broke. She didn't crack up. She was just brought up hard against the fact that she'd had a lucky start, and if she was going to continue in the business, then she'd have to rebuild her career from scratch.

And she'd have to rebuild it from different elements. The baby face that had floated her through her early twenties had grown harder and more lined. The natural blonde of her hair had darkened to a light brown. She could of course have kept the colour artificially, but decided not to. The new Sally Luther was not going to be a clone of the old.

She had never been as stupid as she appeared on the screen. She applied her considerable intelligence and pragmatism to starting again.

Charles Paris admired the determination with which Sally Luther had hit the comeback trail. She had immersed herself in stage work, learning the basics of a trade which her television success had bypassed. She had taken small parts in out-of-the-way theatres, slowly building competence and experience. She had worked her way up from being a pretty face to a respectable actress, and the Asphodel Productions' Viola was the highest point yet of her reconstituted career.

It was Charles's secret opinion that Sally Luther, even with all her grafting away, was not really a good enough actress to play Viola. But he respected her professionalism and enjoyed working with her.

The Trustees of Chailey Ferrars grudgingly – it was the adverb with which they performed their every action – allowed the
Twelfth Night
cast a small room off the ground floor administrative office in which to change. So, amidst coffee machines-and photocopiers, and in cramped proximity to Vasile Bogdan and the three – mercifully small – actresses, Charles Paris donned his Sir Toby Belch costume.

He was pleased that Gavin Scholes was doing the play in what he, Charles, thought of as the ‘right' period – in other words, contemporary with when it had been written. Charles Paris had had enough of gimmicky productions of Shakespeare. He'd been in a nineteen-twenties flapper-style
Love's Labour's Lost
; he'd worn cut-off jeans as Bardolph in
Henry V
, a pin-striped suit as one of the tribunes in
Coriolanus,
a hippie kaftan as Lancelot Gobbo, and even a tutu in a hopelessly misconceived cross-dressing
All's Well
. . . (‘
All's Well That Ends Well,
but here was a production which neither started nor ended well. In fact, so far as this critic's concerned, it would have ended much better three hours before it actually did' –
Financial Times
).

What a relief, after all that, to be playing Shakespeare in appropriate dress. Gavin Scholes' lack of imagination did have its advantages.

Also, for once, Charles actually had a new costume. For most period productions of his career he'd been dressed in something hired from a theatrical costumier or tatted together from whatever could be found in Wardrobe. He'd become accustomed to other men's clothes, to walking around in the aura – or, in certain regrettable instances, the smell – of another actor.

But Asphodel employed a pukka costume designer for all their shows. This was partly so that the costumes could reflect a production design concept; but there were practical reasons too. A four-month engagement justified the expense of specially made costumes, and the company was also shrewdly building up its own wardrobe stock which was increasingly hired out to other managements. There were astute business brains behind Asphodel Productions.

Charles Paris liked his Sir Toby Belch costume. The designer's overall theme was muted greys and silver, which reflected
Twelfth Night
's underlying melancholy – and also pointed up even more the virulent shock of Malvolio's yellow cross-gartering.

And the designer had not succumbed to the common error of making Sir Toby scruffy. The man was a gentleman of the court, after all, so Charles Paris was dressed in charcoal velvet doublet and hose, piped with silver and slashed with oyster-coloured silk. He had a silver-frosted ruff and a small charcoal hat with a fluffy pale-grey feather. As Charles donned the costume in the Chailey Ferrars office, he did feel rather pleased with himself.

He felt particularly pleased that the costume's generous cut rendered his own paunch inadequate and forced him actually to pad for the role. This gave Charles a spurious sense of righteousness, as did the fact that he also had to redden his face with make-up. The Bell's whisky may have taken its toll, but it had not yet sufficiently ravaged his complexion for him to play Sir Toby without cosmetic help. All encouraging stuff.

As well as a specially made costume, Charles had had a customised beard constructed by Wig Creations, and this too gave him a sense of being pampered. As he peered into the tiny mirror, the familiar alcohol smell of spirit gum in his nostrils, and pressed Sir Toby's luxuriant moustache on to his upper lip, Charles Paris felt good.

His self-satisfaction must have expressed itself in his body language, because Tottie Roundwood, reaching round to pull up the zip of her jet-black Maria costume, grinned and said, ‘Yes, very handsome indeed.'

Charles grinned back. ‘Let me.' He reached across to help her with the zip.

Tottie Roundwood was probably around the fifty mark, short, plumpish, dark hair beginning to be streaked with grey. She was one of those actresses capable of enormous fireworks on stage, but quiet and reserved the rest of the time. Charles liked her, though he knew little about her, except that she was interested in some system of alternative medicine. Reflexology? Healing? Homeopathy? One of those, anyway, he couldn't remember.

He patted her shoulder to indicate that the dress was secure, and reflected on the total lack of sexual charge the contact gave him. Actors and actresses are so used to sharing dressing rooms that gender becomes irrelevant. Charles couldn't help noticing out of the corner of his eye that Sally Luther still had a pretty good body, though.

To his surprise, this little glancing thought made him feel guilty. There was a tiny pang of disloyalty to Frances, with whom he'd made tender and extended love the night before. Obviously his wife's body had to give Sally Luther's twenty years, but it was still looking pretty terrific. And, he concluded virtuously after a covert look at Talya Northcott slipping into her costume, I don't fancy that really young one at all. Neat little figure, nice blonde hair maybe, but it doesn't do a thing for me.

Goodness, thought Charles Paris, I am changing. If this goes on, I'll soon be positively uxorious.

Gavin Scholes came bustling into the office. ‘OK, are you set? The press – such as they are – are all here, and we're ready to go.'

‘. . . BUT PERHAPS the Shakespeare is the jewel in our crown – though of course the Great Wensham Festival is a crown of many jewels – as you will be able to see from the press releases that are on the table over there. Anyway, we of the Festival Society are absolutely delighted to welcome, for the third year running. Asphodel Productions. I'm sure you all enjoyed their
Midsummer Night's Dream
and
As You Like It
and I am confident that we can look forward to the same qualities of robust storytelling in this year's
Twelfth Night
– whose performance, incidentally, is made possible by the generous sponsorship of Mutual Rel –'

At a warning cough from a dark-haired woman beside him, the Festival Director, Julian Roxborough-Smith, hastily corrected himself. ‘– of a variety of national and local businesses which you will find listed in the press release. I would also like to acknowledge at this point the invaluable contribution made by Hertfordshire Arts Network, without which the scope of the Great Wensham Festival would be considerably less broad.

‘As you see, some members of the
Twelfth Night
cast have been good enough to join us today. Yes, they are in costume – those aren't their normal street clothes.' A little pause for the even littler joke. No reaction. ‘But before we become more informal and you get a chance to chat to them, I'm going to call on
Twelfth Night
's director to say a few words about the production. Ladies and gentlemen of the press, will you please welcome Mr Gavin Scholes.'

‘Lady and gentleman of the press' might have been more accurate, Charles reflected. Though there were lavish amounts of sandwiches and other snacks – and a gratifying number of wine bottles – laid out in the dining hall of Chailey Ferrars for the press' conference, there did seem to be a marked lack of press.

A bored-looking man in his fifties held a notebook and pencil, but had not yet heard anything he deemed worthy of recording; and an earnest-looking girl, barely out of her teens, pointed a cassette player with great concentration at whoever happened to be speaking. Otherwise, a single photographer, burdened down by a shoulder bag of camera impedimenta, shifted from one foot to the other at the back of the hall, with the expression of someone who should already have moved on to cover the local primary school's Wildfowl Week.

Julian Roxborough-Smith's address was unlikely to have stirred much excitement among the press, even if more of them had been present. It was not what he said that was uncharismatic; it was the manner of his saying it. The Festival Director had one of those languid, slightly theatrical voices which suggests he is doing everyone a favour by speaking at all, and imparts an unintentional tinge of contempt to everything. He was a tall man pushing sixty and turning to fat. His sandy hair was thinning. He wore a suit in broad pin-stripe. The thick-framed glasses and spotted bow-tie seemed to accentuate rather than obscure the nondescript nature of his face.

‘
Twelfth Night
,' Gavin Scholes began, ‘is one of the most charming of Shakespeare's comedies, and yet at the same time it is one of the darkest. The treatment meted out to Malvolio alone prevents the play from being the jolly romp which it is sometimes portrayed.. .as,' he added uneasily, having got a little lost in his syntax. ‘And in my production I have deliberately emphasised the –'

‘Look, if you want to have any photographs, we're going to have to do them now,' a harsh voice interrupted from the back of the dining hall. ‘I'm already running late.'

Since with no visual record the press conference would be even more of a non-event than it was already, the photographer's bad manners won the day, and the five costumed cast members were trooped out to the formal gardens to strike Elizabethan poses against the statuary.

They were shepherded by a small, anxious woman who had identified herself earlier as Pauline Monkton, press officer for the Great Wensham Festival. She kept apologising for the lack of press at the conference and, while apologies were certainly in order, the way she went on about it quickly became wearing.

‘I mean, I don't know what you can do,' she said plaintively. ‘They all got invited – the nationals and everything. They had their invitations
weeks
ago. And they did say RSVP, but, do you know, hardly any of them have even
bothered
to reply. I mean, once you've invited them and given them all the information, well, what else can you
do
?'

Hire a professional publicist or public relations company, would have been Charles's answer. He had encountered the fatal touch of the amateur at other arts festivals, and he knew it almost never worked. Publicity is a hard-nosed cut-throat business, there are any number of highly sophisticated organisations out there lobbying for media coverage, and one earnest middle-aged woman sending out invitations – even with RSVP on them – doesn't stand a chance. Goodwill can only go so far. If you want a job professionally done, you have to pay a professional to do it.

Local newspaper photographers, as a breed, are not the subtlest of people, and what the one from the
Great Wensham Observer
was really after was a bit of cleavage. He managed to get a meagre ration from Tottie Roundwood, lolling lasciviously on Sir Toby Belch's lap. He tried to persuade Talya Northcott to take up a provocative pose, but was quickly deterred by a righteous blast of political correctness. And he was disappointed to find Sally Luther (whose tits had once been quite famous) doubleted up to the neck in her male Cesario rather than her female Viola costume. Her face was framed by a pageboy-cut blond wig, identical to the one Russ Lavery would wear as her twin Sebastian.